News

What is Kismet?

Kismet is a wireless network detector, sniffer, and intrusion detection system. Kismet works with Wi-Fi (IEEE802.11) cards, as well as Bluetooth devices for scanning dicoverable BT and BTLE devices, the RTL-SDR radio for detecting wireless sensors, thermometers, and switches, and a growing collection of other capture hardware.

Beta (and Git) vs Stable

The new 2018 beta version of Kismet represents a huge change in the code.

You can find directions for downloading the beta or git-master and compiing it on the downloads page and the Kismet documentation has directions for compiling and staying up to date with the development code.

A full release with the new features is forthcoming for those who prefer not to compile from source!

Unified 'kismetdb' log file which can store device records, alerts, messages, and packets in a single file

Pcap-NG multi-interface capture support with original packet headers

Live streaming of realtime captures over HTTP

All new super-light remote capture code

Support for non Wi-Fi protocols like Bluetooth, RTL433 SDR-based sensor detection, and more

Multithreaded packet decoding for higher workloads

Massive (50+) multi-radio support

Development

You can follow (semi-infrequent) in-depth development posts on the development blog.

For real-time information about new features under development in Kismet you can follow @KismetWireless on Twitter.

Interested in hacking on Kismet or talking to the Kismet server via another tool, or extract the data via scripts? Check out the developer docs in the git repo for in-depth info on all the REST endpoints and Kismet interfaces.

Guides and How-Tos

The Kismet Documentation is the first place you should look for how to do things - the new Kismet has a lot of configuration options (even more than before) and while it generally tries to do the "right thing", you may have an edge case.

Compiling and using Kismet on OSX - Kismet can run on OSX using the built-in Wi-Fi adapter; unfortunately there are currently no monitor-capable USB drivers on OSX, but if you're looking to use Kismet on a Mac, this will help you out.

Compiling and using Kismet on Win10 WSL - It's not possible to capture packets directly on Win10 with the WSL, but Kismet can run and communicate with remote sensors (including "local" devices like a Raspberry Pi3 or Pi0W running the Kismet capture code).

Screenshots (2018-Beta / git-master)

Plugins (2018-Beta)

In Kismet 2018, Kismet now supports plugins which extend the UI via web functionality, as well as traditional plugins which extend the server functionality. It's even possible to combine the two, integrating external tools using scripting languages like Python.

Some new plugins for Kismet include:

Kestrel

Kestrel adds live mapping to the Kismet UI using the Leaflet library, overlaying network and device locations on a live map.